Crafting With Consciousness

I have a confession… I am a link-sender. I send many many links and videos and pictures to friends and family, and I’m not one of those kind, relaxed link senders. I’m like ‘have you read it? how about now?….now? You’re killing me! Watch the goddamn video I sent you asshole. ‘ (thankfully, that’s the internal monologue rather than the external one). So I figured that I would continue in that vein on the blog in Things I’d Force My Friends to Read. Without further ado, here it is.

I am slightly late to the game but two of my lovely Instagram friends/knitwear designers (who are also an adorable sister-in-law duo) Andrea and Lesley are hosting a KAL for their new collaboration Knit in Color. I am generally against KALs because knitting on deadlines stress me out, but I love their patterns and I am all about supporting badass entrepreneurial women. I chose Pop Fizzle, which is a hat and therefore not a huge commitment. First step: color choices. I tend to have a difficult time choosing yarn so I got out most of my fingering stash that isn’t already committed to other projects, and started playing around. The pattern calls for a DK but I’m going to swatch fingering held double. Final decision: Tosh Sock and Lynai sock yarn in Bloom. Now to cast on.

My feet with New England foliage is literally the most generic picture I have ever taken. What does it have to do with this post, you may ask? Absolutely nothing. But I didn’t really have an “I’m back and changing the direction of this blog” picture in my arsenal. I’ll work on it.

I’ve thought a lot lately about blogging, and a friend encouraged me to pick it back up, so here I am (metaphorically obviously, I literally am somewhere else and if we go down this path we will get into some metaphysical shit). So I am back and this is going to be a very different place than it was, because honestly I am a very different person than I was when I last blogged.

This will be a space where I talk about knitting, creating, intersectional feminism, fat acceptance, mental illness, and whatever the fuck else I feel like. It will be political, and I will talk about race. and gender. and class. and how those things affect craft. I will say fuck. Potentially a lot. And I can guarantee that there will be missteps, because I am human and like most Americans was raised on a steady diet of problematic shit. I will try my best to not be problematic, acknowledge when I am, and then not do it again. I’m not saying that every post will be political, but they will exist. I refuse to allow blogging to be pretty pictures of beautiful crafts and yummy food and pretend that things like institutional racism don’t exist. If you want to hear about the prison industrial complex one day and about my desire to roll around naked in alpaca the next this is probably the place for you. If you don’t want to roll around naked in alpaca you should probably GTFO (unless you’re allergic, then you have an excuse. I don’t know about the rest of you, y’all seem suspicious and I don’t trust your alpaca-hating selves). I am not from the south but I will probably say y’all a lot, because it’s my favorite gender-neutral second-person pronoun. Now say “gender neutral second person pronoun” 5 times fast. I can’t do it either.

So, that’s all I have for you right now. At some point I’ll figure out a better way to end a post then telling y’all I’m ending the post, but that day is not today. We all need goals.

This is one of my favorite self-portraits that I made for a photography class. And it’s out of focus. I am convinced that the best picture every single person has ever taken is blurry. Which is either poetry or really fucking annoying. Or both.

So, although I had the best of intentions to start posting regularly, it hasn’t happened. This being my senior year of college, it’s insane to think that I can maintain this blog. I believe that I’ll come back here in the future, but I need a little bit of closure on this for the moment. If you want to follow along with my yarn-y adventures, I’m super active on Instagram and would love to connect there (I’m @sarahelana).

It’s been quite a while since I’ve been around these parts. This last year has been completely insane, but with summer coming I think that I’ll finally have time to give this blog the attention that it deserves. I’ve got some big summer plans, and I hope you’ll stick around. I’m starting with a wooly wednesday post to dip my toes back into the blogging pond. Get ready for some serious wool-y cuteness.

Before my computer just shut down and I lost it, I wrote a witty and charming post about this blanket (now that it’s gone, I get to pretend that it was witty and charming and no one can say it wasn’t). Lesson of the day: save your damn work. It’s okay, I’ll recover eventually from the emotional trauma that this has inflicted. This is a blanket that I’m making for my Bubbe (the Yiddish word for grandma). She has been let’s just say unhappy with my lack of knitted gifts to her (considering there have been many proposed projects but no finished products). That’s all about to change. I’ve dubbed this “The Tornado,” and I’m excited about making it. This pattern is from Woolly Thoughts. All of their patterns are based on math, and they’re fabulous. Back to the Tornado. My Bubbe and I have different tastes in color (VERY different tastes), but the pattern is interesting enough that I can ignore it.

It’s been a nearly two month break, but I’m back, and hopefully with a vengeance (the good kind, not the kind where I murder everyone). I’m back in Boston for school, and the last month has been a haze of getting ready to leave, and leaving, and starting classes, all of which I know are fascinating for other people to hear. But before I bore you to tears, let me show you pretty yarn, and you can “ooh” and “ahh” all you like.

This piece of knitting is truly breathtaking. Not only is it beautiful, but I cannot really even begin to comprehend the technical skills that you need to have to design this.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, this is in no way a sheep, or wool related. I would tell you that you are correct. The more of these I do, the less sheep-y they seem to be. And let me tell you, I have resisted the cute animal craze for a long time, but I’ve finally caved. So here is a teacup pig for your viewing pleasure.

Just popping in to say hi, so hi. It’s super late here, but I’m feeling really inspired right now and I don’t want to ruin it with sleep. Maybe that’s not particularly healthy reasoning, but I’m running with it. I’ve been making tons of lists lately, so I thought I’d make a list of what’s inspiring me right now:

1. Lists. Okay, this might sound weird, but I’m a total list person. It’s funny, because I have awful time management and I’m not organized, but I really like lists. I’m a walking contradiction. I have started taking a notebook with me everywhere full of lists. I have my to do list which I just continually add to and cross things off, but then I also have lists for blog ideas, craft ideas, and all kinds of other things. It’s really helping me straighten out the ideas from the jumbled mess in my head. (In case you’re wondering, I’m totally the kind of person who, if I do something not on my list, put it on my list after and cross it off. If you do this too, know that you are not alone, and I think it’s perfectly acceptable behavior).

2. Books. When I was younger, I was a total bookworm. I would stay up all night reading a book, I would juggle like 5 books at a time (I’m a tad bit insane), and I tore through books. Through high school I would have spurts of reading tons of books, and then times when I really wouldn’t read that much. Since starting college, I haven’t read for pleasure AT ALL. I take pretty much all liberal arts classes that require hundreds of pages of reading a week, and I’m usually so sick of reading by the end of the week that doing it for pleasure sounds about as fun as getting a tattoo on my eyeball (In case you’re wondering, I have NO desire to get a tattoo on my eyeball). This summer I promised myself that I would read 5 books. I felt like I was watching waaaaay too much TV and I could feel my brain turning to mush. These last few weeks I have been back to my bookworm ways and I’m loving it. I’m planning on doing some posts on the books I’ve been reading.

3. A Beautiful Mess. I have a little bit of an obsessive personality, and when I find something I like, be it a blog or a television show or a podcast, I want to see it from the beginning. I’ve been following A Beautiful Mess for a while now, and it’s in my top 3 blogs, I absolutely love it. I decided to go through the archives and read it from the beginning. It’s kind of a weird but wonderful experience. You see people’s lives almost in fast forward. They might write once a day, but if I’m reading the archives I usually read at least a month in one sitting. It’s amazing to see the changes and evolution of people this way. Seeing Elsie’s creative process and the evolution of her business has been amazing and really helpful in thinking about where I want to go. Also, the idea of becoming a prolific creator by staying constantly inspired and just making thing all the time has really stuck with me.

4. Setting goals. This is connected with reading A Beautiful Mess and the lists. See? Everything is connected. Elsie is amazing at setting goals for herself, which is something I’ve never really thought about. I’ve started setting goals, and so far so good. I set summer goals and they’ve been going really well. I’m starting to think about what my goals will be for the school year.

5. Actually doing projects that I plan to. I have a huge list of projects that I want to make, and I rarely cross things off that list. Yesterday I did a project that has been on my list for a long time (I’ll share it hopefully tomorrow) and not only was it amazing to make, but it gave me so much motivation. I just felt a surge of forward motion after finishing it.

6. I was talking to my dad the other night as I was working on a project, and he was trying to antagonize me (as he often does), asking along the lines of why I didn’t just buy what I was making. He was just kidding, but it allowed me to talk a bit about what creativity is to me. Creating has always been really important to me, but it has recently taken over a much larger portion of my life, and I now understand that it is a vital part of me, I HAVE to create. I told him that part of it is about the fight against mass production, but that’s just a small thing. Part of it is the final product, although that’s not so important to me right now. Part of it is tapping into the history of crafts and what it means to be a craftsperson. These are obviously not that well thought out ideas and there’s more to it than those things, but I’m really interested in this topic. I think that I will work on flushing these ideas out, and write about what creativity is to me or how it affects my life or something like that.

Thanks for listening to my ramblings and I hope you are all feeling as inspired as I do.

I have a confession… I am a link-sender. I send many many links and videos and pictures to friends and family, and I’m not one of those kind, relaxed link senders. I’m like ‘have you read it? how about now?….now? You’re killing me! Watch the goddamn video I sent you asshole. ‘ (thankfully, that’s the […]